[FIC] 'Twas Passing Strange
Author: artemis_sparks
Title: 'Twas Passing Strange
Rating: PG13
Word Count: 7,486
Pairing(s): Past Remus/Sirius and Remus/Tonks, one-sided Teddy/Sirius
Warnings: Angst
Disclaimer: All Harry Potter characters herein are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No copyright infringement is intended
Summary: Teddy is given an old journal of his father's. Suddenly everything he knew about Remus turns out to be nothing at all - and it seems like Sirius Black is the key to figuring everything out.
Author's Notes: Insane thanks to my beta K for being perpetually amazing! Made a brief reference to a Bob Dylan song. Title from Othello..
The journal begins like this: under a date in mid-June, the words Sirius died today.
Harry drops it into his hands with a distressed, helpless little shrug and says, "I - Bill gave it to me, must've - At some point during the - the last war, Remus must've left it there. It got swept in with a bunch of other things, I think, Fleur'd only just found it in a box of old stuff -"
"Thanks," Teddy interrupts. He doesn't glance up at Harry, who is no doubt furrowing his brow in worry. Teddy's eyes are locked on the journal in his hands, its hard leather cover, the pages thin with age. He looks without reading first. His father's handwriting is precise and clear though the pages it's contained upon are stained and dusty. "Was there anything else?"
Harry shrugs again. "I don't think so, no. Are you - are you alright?"
Teddy does look up then, mouth quirking into a tight, quick smile. He's not quite sure what to feel. "Yeah. Yeah, I -" He looks back at the journal. "Thanks."
Sirius is a familiar enough name for Teddy. Harry's godfather - there's a picture of him up in Grimmauld somewhere. Mostly he associates the name with James, though, and not so much James' namesake. He wracks his brain - Sirius died when, exactly? He's sure Harry told him. Harry was a teenager at the time.
That's how the journal starts; the next entry is marked a few weeks later and says only Moving today, again. No longer safe at Grimmauld. All the entries are like that. They're short, quickly scribbled notes on progress, full of names Teddy half-remembers from history books, wartime things.
He closes the book before he goes too far, holding it unintentionally tight in his hands. He should savour it, it's all he has.
Gran spoke fairly freely about Teddy's mum. He grew up with pictures of her all over the walls, every one inspiring a different anecdote. His childhood bedroom is the same one his mum grew up in; there are remnants of her everywhere, from the loud yellow of the walls (he never did have the heart to paint over it) to the Weird Sisters poster stuck on the ceiling with a Permanent Sticking Charm. Every time he changes his hair colour, he thinks of her and it's comforting. He feels close to her.
The thing is, no one ever really talked about Teddy's father (who he rarely thinks of as Remus or dad, preferring always my father? tilting up like a question, as if there's doubt) and Teddy never really knew how to ask.
He knows the basic facts, of course. Remus Lupin (a name sandwiched within Teddy's own): teacher, werewolf, friend of Harry's parents, hero. Hero. Now that's a funny one - that got stamped on all of them, didn't it? Anyone who died for the cause got saddled with the epithet. But Teddy's father isn't in the history books and that says it all, really.
Teddy tried to ask once, fourteen and terrified. He kept his voice as still as possible as he said to Harry, "Tell me about my dad."
Harry bit his lip and fumbled like he did, finally spitting out, "He was a good man. He meant a lot to me."
That's what they all said, when they said anything at all. Remus Lupin - he was a good man. That didn't tell Teddy anything.
Teddy craves raw meat sometimes. He isn't sure if it's psychosomatic or not but it's the closest thing he's got.
---
The journal stays tucked in Teddy's interior jacket pocket for three days before he looks at it again. The slight weight and bulk of it is a constant reminder.
After work he heads to Grimmauld for his weekly dinner with Harry. Since the divorce, with James traveling all over and Al immersed in work and Lily being, well, Lily about everything, Harry's been quite obviously lonely. Teddy knows how much Harry looks forward to seeing him every week so, parental angst or not, he wouldn't miss it.
As they sit there, chatting about this or that nonsense, it occurs to Teddy that Harry would understand better than anyone what he's going through. Of anyone, Harry would be the one to help him. Still, Teddy finds his throat is too tight for him to even begin to explain.
He sleeps there that night and, curled safely in room he's slept in every other week since he was fourteen, he opens the journal again, reading over what he's already read. He taps his finger against his mother's name every time he finds it.
2 July
Tonks has offered me a place to stay. Rather feel she's being a bit cheeky, but either way best not to encourage the flirtation.
10 July
Scrimgeour to replace Fudge. Mixed feelings. Another article about Harry.
11 July
Never know what to say to Tonks. She's beginning to look rather drawn. It's my fault. I didn’t ask for that. It's merely infatuation, I'm sure, and couldn't have come at a more inconvenient time.
22 July
Dementor attacks. Third time this month.
24 July
Igor Karkaroff dead. Hardly surprised. Ollivander gone.
31 July
Harry's birthday. I'm a poor excuse for any kind of - any kind of parental figure, I suppose. Now James and Sirius are both gone, I should be helping him. I haven't spoken to him in weeks and even today at the Weasleys' found myself at a loss. I should be asking how he is. I should be telling him about Sirius. I should be comforting him. But, like always, I do nothing.
Teddy pauses, closing the journal around the place-marker of his finger, and flops onto his back, staring at the canopy of his bed. Despite his stationary position, he can feel his heart beating hard in his chest. Victoire used to say that to him all the time. It's why they broke up. She said that exactly, he never did anything. Like he was paralyzed.
He opens it up again, flipping a few pages, skimming over every passage without his mother's name in it.
4 October
Kissed Tonks today. I don't know why I did that.
23 October
Tonks keeps Owling. I haven't returned one yet.
14 November
Spent the night with Tonks. God I am stupid and lonely and stupider for it.
Brow furrowed, Teddy stops again. Gran had never mentioned any problems between his parents, aside from her own distaste for their age difference and, though she'd never say it, a veiled dislike for his father.
He skips forward again, too eager.
13 January
Sometimes when we're lying together and Tonks lets me see her natural face, the face she was born with (or close enough to it), with her hair curling short and black around her ears, she reminds me so much of Sirius that it's a tangible pang. I love her, I think - or perhaps I love the things in her which are like things in Sirius, the liveliness of their eyes or that grin, something burning in both of them that seems so inextinguishable. Something I have rarely felt, at any rate. Her hair goes red-orange when she sees me, or a pink like a flush. I've never been so openly pursued. Her laugh is so loud - not barking, like Sirius, but loud and raucous and unladylike and lovely. I could come to love Tonks very much, I think.
Teddy stares at the page. That couldn't possibly - his father couldn't possibly mean -
In the morning, he sits across from Harry at the breakfast table and doesn't say a single word.
---
In the midst of wondering why everyone would encourage this false picture of his parents for years, it occurs to him that Harry might not have even known. The way his father mentioned it (like it was an old scar, the kind you get so used to it's like it isn't even there), the - the whatever-it-was with Sirius Black could've been years before Harry's time. Which leaves, in Teddy's immediate circle of availability, his Gran and Great Aunt Narcissa as references. Which might as well be like starting from nowhere. He can't exactly walk up to them and ask after his father's possible-maybe-who-knows gay lover.
The ink-stained, tea-stained, leather-bound parchment journals contain a multitude of musings but no definite answers on that one front: Teddy has no idea if his father fucked Sirius Black or not. Did he - did he just yearn, yearn like Teddy is prone to, and never doing anything about it? Or did he do everything and it was the losing of it that ripped his heart to shreds?
If his heart was even ripped to shreds - romanticism is another thing Teddy shares with his mother, if Gran is to be believed.
One page says: I wonder what it is like not to feel guilty. A few lines beneath it in another shade of ink: God, Remus, must you be so fucking melodramatic? And now I'm scolding myself. Below, again in another shade: For lack of anyone else to scold, really.
It's Teddy's favourite bit. His fingers know its place without trying now.
He hears the words in his father's voice - or, rather, the voice he has assigned to his father. It's a little of his own voice and a little of Harry's; something else, too, something fatherly, some tone of calm security that Teddy's not even sure is real.
On another page: Love is nothing to be proud of.
Teddy wishes his mother had kept a journal.
---
It comes together in bits and bobs. As an Auror, Teddy has some pull. Enough, at least, to drop a few hints, throw out a few lines. It's not long before his owl is dropping a plain, brown-wrapped package on his desk, slim and shaped like the last. The Hogwarts crest stares up at him from its bed of wax.
It feels too easy, really.
This journal is older, more carefully dated and kept. The stories it tells are of the schoolteacher variety; lesson plans, ideas for exam questions, that sort of thing. His father sounds much more content. Teddy hates it; he hates reading all the excitement and knowing how it ends.
His father speaks of Harry, mostly, and only sparingly of Harry's parents and Sirius. There is nothing to suggest anything deeper than a friendship firmly in the past. Teddy is beginning to think he's imagined the entire thing.
He sends a thank-you to Headmaster McGonagall for discovering it anyway.
Teddy begins to take the journals with him everywhere, opening them at every spare moment, as if some miracle tell-all passage will appear each time. There is only that one passage, however, that he reads over and over again. Perhaps I love the things in her which are like things in Sirius.
Teddy tries not to think too hard about the fact that his spot on the family tree is a mere skip and a jump away from Sirius' - he tries not to think too hard about the fact that out of all the girls he could've chosen, his father picked Sirius' cousin to marry - he tries very hard not to think about having his dad's eyes and the Black family nose, the straight narrow-bridged nose that his mum and his gran and her sisters and their cousins all had in every portrait he can see in Grimmauld Place.
---
The renovations on Grimmauld have been going on for nearly as long as Teddy can remember, though Harry's vigour for the task was renewed with his divorce. Teddy helps whenever he can. It's soothing to do mindless bullshit like take down wallpaper or sand furniture, try to undo the charm behind Mrs Black's portrait.
It occurs to him that now, however, there is another good reason to comb through the old house.
The only room in the entire house that Harry has not touched is Sirius'. Being on the top floor, hardly anyone has need of it, and Teddy can understand wanting to leave a little shrine behind. Teddy himself has never ventured inside it, as though there was an unwritten rule that it was off-limits. He decides Harry won't mind this once.
There, amongst far-flung dusty clothing and sheets that haven't been slept in in over twenty years, are all the things sixteen year old Sirius Black left behind when he ran away from home. The bedside drawer is full of offensively explicit girlie mags. Remnants of school uniforms are everywhere. Teddy threads a Gryffindor tie through his fingers, feeling the dust more than the fabric, and turns it over to find, surprisingly enough, the name R.J. Lupin sewn into the tag.
Methodically, Teddy searches every cabinet and drawer, taps every floorboard, uses every detection skill he can remember to unearth something hidden. He knows without knowing why that anything important he finds here will be secreted away. Which it is, he discovers, when one of his spells pushes aside a panel of the ceiling.
He hops up onto a chair and then onto the desk, adding a few inches to his height when even that is not enough. He casts a Summoning Charm; there is the faint sound of rattling but nothing emerges. Taking a deep breath and hoping not to encounter too much dust or rat droppings, Teddy plunges a hand into the darkness. He casts about for a few minutes before his fingers meet a hard edge, curling over the lid of what must be a box.
Teddy sets the box gently on the desk, clambering back to the ground. He traces the lip where lid meets body, the clasp. When he tries to open it, the clasp rears up and bites his finger. Nearly half-smiling, Teddy taps it a few times with his wand, muttering this or that, and the box lays deceptively dormant. Or honestly dormant, because when Teddy flips it open the second jinx he was expecting isn't present. Nothing happens.
Inside are a handful of photographs, a pack of parchment tied with twine, some notebooks, badges, and cigarettes. None of the notebooks are his father's, strictly speaking - they're full of all different inks and handwritings, notebooks passed between four boys throughout their school days. It almost doesn't read like English to Teddy; it's a language of inside jokes and half-sentences, reliance on the other person reading to understand without really explaining.
The pictures are mostly the boys too. Two of them tackling one while another takes the photo. Sirius and Harry's father sneak up on Teddy's father as he studies and his father's photo-self jumps so violently he's almost airborne for a moment. One is just of Sirius making faces at the camera. Teddy leans in closer and Sirius gives him a saucy wink.
He's very handsome, which Teddy remembers having heard before.
The pack of parchment is almost immediately revealed to be letters, some of them standing out because of the familiar scrawl.
Teddy sets them back in the box before he can be too tempted to pull the twine free and snaps the lid shut. His heart has found its way into his throat.
When Teddy returns downstairs, things all left in Sirius' room until he can deal with them again, he finds Harry putting lunch together.
"Alright, Ted?" Harry's eyes rake over him with concern, implying Teddy looks anything but.
"Yeah, yeah." Teddy sits at the table, nodding his head absently as Harry places food in front of him. "It's just this house, you know. Sometimes gives me the creeps."
Teddy's barely swallowed the last bite of his meal before he's bounding up the stairs again. Everything is just where he left it, of course.
Teddy sets aside any James letters for Harry. Then he stares at the little pile left for himself. He picks one up without looking at the date; might as well start anywhere.
Sirius, the letter begins. No salutations, no dashes, just Sirius, almost chiding. Sirius, don't be stupid. Difficult for you, I know. Regulus may be a prat but he's hardly -
Teddy zips through them. Most of the letters are like that: counselling. Don't run away. Stay with James when you do. Don't act rashly. Keep your calm. Count to bloody ten if you have to, Sirius, God.
The startling thing is, near the end of one such message, an entirely different handwriting, near-unintelligible: Say what you mean, Remus, say what you really mean. Teddy cross-checks with some of the other things from the box and, yes, it really must be Sirius' handwriting. Sirius' inky black lettering changes drastically from line to line, sometimes cramped and miniscule and in other places widely scrawled. It's like he was too excited to be focused, his hand unable to move as fast as his brain and him unwilling to compromise.
---
The owl shows up with a note from Harry explaining that, after Fleur found the last one, he'd gone through some of the things found in Godric's Hollow again. Wouldn't Teddy be pleased to know what he discovered?
Teddy locks himself in his office with the shades drawn and rests his forehead on his folded arms for a long, long time. Once his breathing is back under control, he cracks the journal to see the date and heaves a sigh of gratitude and relief. Nineteen seventy-nine.
Teddy's father has a lot to say about Sirius in nineteen seventy-nine.
Teddy's father speaks of the cigarettes Sirius Black smoked that expelled midnight blue puffs and smelled of cardamom and cloves, like a particularly spicy tea. Teddy remembers the half-crushed packet of them from the box (which smelled more like mothballs and dust) that Teddy now keeps in the back of his sock drawer. He's memorized the label by now; he picks them up on his lunch break.
Another day: At Sirius' flat. Dropped in on by his cousin Andromeda and her daughter. She left about a year's worth of food here for Sirius but we've consumed roughly three quarters of it already. I -
Then a squiggle and a splatter of ink, like the quill had been knocked out of his hand and, in entirely different but just as familiar font, Dear diary, Sirius is ever so handsome, it is a near physical pain to be in his presence without giving in to the burning desire to pin him to the mat- And then another splatter, then nothing, the journal beginning again quite normally on the next page with no mention of it.
It's Sirius being funny. Sirius and Teddy's father holed up in a flat having a laugh.
When Teddy goes home, he plays Sirius Black's records and smokes Sirius Black's cigarettes, imagining his father and Sirius and Harry's dad in Gryffindor Tower doing the same thing. They taste like something Teddy will never touch (a thrill in his throat; he's got his father's melodrama, hasn't he?) and he wonders if his father ever smoked Sirius' cigarettes or just tasted them on Sirius' tongue.
Teddy blows blue smoke rings, letting his hair darken and grow until it falls over his eyes. Moodily, he shuts his eyes and tips his head back; when he opens them, they're grey. He wonders idly if he got the shade right. Probably not. The music seems to mock him. Did you ever hear them church bells toll, it crows mournfully, mean another poor boy is dead and gone.
He gets up, ambling over to the mirror and shaking off his disguise as he does so. Unless he actively makes himself, he doesn't look much like his father. Except the colour of his eyes, as everyone always says. Maybe his mouth, from certain angles. It's hard to know unless people tell him.
He peers at himself, shaking his head until his hair gets longer and shaggier, brown mixed with grey. That makes the resemblance better. He changes the shape of his nose, makes it less proportionate, slightly sharper. A scar bubbles to the surface of his skin, slashed across his cheeks.
He turns back to his bed and, looping the dusty Gryffindor tie around his neck loosely, lets himself get taller and skinnier. The picture of Sirius is tucked into the entry about the flat. He touches himself and hears, in the voice he's given to Sirius (low and rough, sexy but boyish, playful), Remus.
He imagines a hand on the tie, pulling him close, imagines the hand on his fly is not his own. His back arches. Teddy, whispered in his ear.
---
When Teddy wakes up amongst the scattered debris of his own fucked up obsession, he almost makes a vow to himself to stop. To stop and pack up everything and start becoming a functional person again and maybe go on a date, or whatever it is normal people do. He splashes water on his face, shakes his hair blue, and has almost convinced himself of this plan, except for one key fact: he knows he'd never do it. He just wouldn't. He's an Auror; he's Harry Potter's godson; he's got a mystery in his hands and he can't do anything but solve it.
He acquiesces to a dinner with Gran. He breathes in her familiar homey kitchen smells and listens idly to her motherly chiding and interrupts, "Do you have anything of my father's?" When she falters, he continues, "Or Sirius Black's? Because I found some of my father's stuff at Grimmauld and I thought, maybe…"
She comes out of the kitchen wiping her hands on a dishtowel and observing him thoughtfully. "I don't know, love."
He knows she does, though. Gran's not the type to put something away and forget it; if she has something of theirs, she knows exactly where it is. He raises his eyebrows at her.
"Alright, alright." She smacks his shoulder as she walks past him. "Don't look at me like that, there's something in the attic. I'll fetch it."
The attic is where Gran puts everything she'd rather not think about. The package she emerges with is unopened and large, surprisingly weighty. She hands it to Teddy, who takes in the cracking purple Ministry seal and the quite faded writing, not clear enough to make out.
"It's what they found on him when he was arrested," she says softly. "Sirius. I never did - I don't even know why they sent it to me, really. I never felt right opening it."
Teddy traces a rip in the brown paper; he doesn't really feel right opening it either. Harry should be the one to do it, the first to handle the things his godfather had on him that night, all these things so thoughtfully returned to the family Sirius didn't love after the Ministry ripped him away from everything he did.
Teddy excuses himself to his old room and opens it.
There is a journal almost identical to all the others. A lighter. A picture of four boys with one of their faces madly scratched out. Teddy can picture Sirius (the handsome boy in the photo who smelled like spices and clean forest air) tormented with grief, tears in his red eyes, scratching out the traitor's face before he went to hunt him down.
Sirius' clothes are also in there. Not robes, though Teddy hadn't been expecting them, but stiff black jeans, a t-shirt with a rip in the collar, and a beaten up leather jacket. Teddy slides his arms into it, feeling it settle cool and dusty around him, and slips his hands into the pockets, fingers meeting a scrap of something.
It's another letter, nearly crumbling, folded over and folded over and folded over.
Teddy's father doesn't open with anything, just starts mid-thought. Teddy's not sure he knows anyone well enough to write them a letter that just begins, without any preamble. It speaks of an intimacy Teddy is unfamiliar with.
I can't forget what you said to me.
I can't, Sirius. It's remarkably unfair to do this to me. You know I feel a great deal for you. You know I You know me, Sirius. I can't imagine you would think - but we've all gone mad nowadays. I've thought things myself, terrible things - I wouldn't give in to them, though, you know that.
I didn't forget. That night before we left school. I didn't forget. I know you didn't either.
Teddy wonders where the evidence is of Sirius writing back - his responses must be lost or burned, done away with by Teddy's father. Or maybe Sirius didn't write back at all, just said exactly what he was feeling without needing the shield of writing it down. He seems the type.
Sirius did, however, seem fond of writing on letters. In the margins, at the foot of the pages, anywhere available defaced with his manic uneven scribble. His words are brief, concise, inconsequential. Several Remus fuck yous. Even more say what you means. And sometimes just Moony, over and over.
It's so fucking frustrating - so much non-information, so much lost. Was there no spell to show it all to Teddy? No mysterious source of all knowledge that could just lay it out for him, like a novel?
Well, there was one place, wasn't there, where secrets went.
And one man, dead, with all the answers.
---
Hermione looks at him quizzically, pausing as she reaches to pull a book off her top shelf. "Why is it you want to know all this, Teddy?" She steps off the ladder, holding the book close to her as she studies him, all sharp brown eyes. "You aren't thinking of doing something hasty, are you?"
Teddy is doing his best to look the part of the sweet trustworthy boy today. He's been looking like hell lately but today he's added a flush to his cheeks and left his hair childishly tousled. He looks at her just as quizzically. "What are you talking about?"
"Well, Teddy," she settles back behind her desk, folding her hands, very professional, "you recently found out some things about your father. And then you show up here asking me about necromancy. It's not very hard to connect the dots."
He breathes a sigh, almost laughing. "Hermione, I'm not trying to bring back my dad. That would be stupid."
"It would be." She's still examining him with a critical eye. "Teddy, you know you can't really bring people back, don't you? I mean, people have tried and succeeded to varying degrees, but the person you'd bring back wouldn't really be them." She softens. "Even when they did succeed, it was only when the person had suffered a magical death. There was spellwork that could be reversed and reworked. And Remus died a natural death, from the wounds he sustained during the battle. There wasn't anything anyone could do. It wasn't magic that killed your father."
Teddy could point out that dying in the middle of a battle before you're even forty is not exactly natural, but he refrains. "I know," he stresses instead. "Believe me, I know. I just want to - to understand a few things, you know?"
I want to understand being the key sentence to getting whatever you wanted from Hermione, she softens even further. "Well, I suppose a little research couldn't hurt." She reluctantly hands over the book, smiling at him sadly. "I trust you, Teddy. I hope it helps."
He swallows hard, forcing an answering smile back onto his face. He may not have lied, exactly, but he is tricking Hermione. He hates it. "Thank you."
---
Al is next. Teddy had planned it down to the last word so of course it came about unexpectedly; he catches Al in a hallway at work, looking harried in his purple Ministry robes. Teddy jumps at the chance, figuring it'll look all the less suspicious if it's a rushed conversation down a busy corridor.
Al looks exhausted, green eyes bloodshot as he wearily gives a, "Hullo, Ted. How are you?"
It's a wonder all the Unspeakables get that same look in their eyes after a few months, distant and worried.
Say what you mean, Teddy tells himself. "Al. I need a hand."
"With what?" Now Al is paying attention, eyes clearing as he takes in Teddy's slightly greying shaggy brown hair, his stubble. "Are you taller?"
Teddy waves that away. "Your department. Harry told me what it looked like inside. I wondered how - how do you know which room to go in?"
Al's eyes have narrowed slightly. "You do get the not speaking part of Unspeakable, right?"
Teddy smiles easily, as though that was an expected answer to his stupid question. "Alright, alright. Forgive me for wanting to know where your office is so I can unceremoniously drop in on you. We don't see each other very much these days, you know, I thought I might force it."
Al's heartstrings are tugged, as Teddy suspected they might be. "It'll get easier after my first few years," Al says. "I'm just so busy." He frowns to himself, seeming to struggle with something, then says, "Okay, but it's only because I trust you and you can't tell anyone and if you come by, do it in disguise or something."
Teddy grins. "Of course."
---
Teddy takes a few weeks off, claiming he needs a break, citing personal time. He must have been more off lately than he's realized because all he gets is a sympathetic nod and a soft, "Of course," from his normally hard supervisor.
Most of the time, Teddy reads. He plans. He studies like he never did at school - ancient Egyptian spellwork and Celtic magic. And he reads the journals over and over again, steeling himself.
There is a journal missing, from somewhere in the late seventies. The dates of the journals he has would prove him wrong, but he knows it. He can feel it. They burn in anticipation and then suddenly they're resigned and he knows - he knows - that something changed between his father and Sirius Black. Something happened.
---
James knows, I think. God love Lily, she's as oblivious as ever. I can't believe he wouldn't have told her. I suppose it's possible he doesn't know, only sometimes he looks at me so knowingly. Lately I feel as though everyone's looking at the wolf in me, as though it means I'm going to hand deliver them to the Dark Lord, but James never looks at me like that.
Sirius told me tonight he thinks there's something rotten in him, because of his family, his blood. I told him I understood that better than anyone.
---
Sirius laughs into Teddy's mouth, raucous but muffled, says you mad boy what did you do. He grasps Teddy with eager hands. Everything smells like dirt and stone.
Sirius is young, younger even than Teddy, younger probably than Teddy has ever felt. He is scattered like jazz, hands in Teddy's hair and teeth at Teddy's throat. His teeth are very white; he bares them like a dog, somewhere between a grin and a growl.
Teddy is all-encompassed by him. His breathing is gaspy and laboured and everywhere all he feels is Sirius. He is parchment and Sirius is ink, he bleeds all over everything. His eyes are grey as stone and his mouth is red, his mouth is on Teddy.
Teddy comes with a rush in Sirius' quick hands. Teddy wakes up with a sharp, painful inhale, as though he'd forgotten to breathe at all. His room is as quiet and empty as it's ever been.
---
It's not as hard to get into the Department of Mysteries as one might think, especially when he can walk in looking just like Al. No one questions him.
He steps through the plain black door into a large, circular room and thinks of stories Ron would tell them when they were little to amuse and frighten them, all these adventures they longed to go on. The black room with its shivering blue flames is less terrifying to Teddy now than it was as a child. It's just a room.
The wall shifts around him noisily. When he takes a step, he half expects the lacquered black floor to ripple beneath his foot, like throwing a rock into the still pond behind the Burrow.
He needn't have talked to Al. It's rather like the room is leading him. He finds the Veil behind the first door he tries, there in the sunken pit Harry once told him about, ringed by benches. Teddy hears it - something whispering, a soft murmur like background noise in a crowded room. He lets Al's face fade back into his own as he starts to set up.
His eyes blur as he's lighting a candle. He shakes the shivers out of his hand and lights the next. These spells are all the same, really - some words, some blood, something of the deceased. All spells are the same, really, it's just intent that matters.
The candles flicker as Teddy recites and, for a brief hopeful moment, the Veil thrashes about violently. There is a gust of cold air, extinguishing the torches and the candles, plunging the room into darkness. Teddy holds his breath, waiting.
Then the torches re-light and the room goes still again. Nothing happens.
Teddy waits.
Nothing happens.
He inhales shakily, scrubbing his hand across his cheeks to dry them. As though he's missed something, his gaze sweeps over the room. It's exactly the same as when he'd entered it. He shuffles madly through his papers, but he'd - he'd done everything right, exactly as he should have, there's no - there's no reason why it wouldn't -
There was a loophole. There had to be a loophole; his father died from the leftovers of spells - burns and cuts and crushed ribs - but Sirius Black just fell through a Veil, which meant he could fall back out of it.
Teddy slumps onto one of the benches. Sirius was - he was the only person who really knew Teddy's father, knew him best, knew what he kept secret, even from himself. He knew Remus' heart. And Teddy was so close.
"You did know it's impossible."
Teddy jumps nearly a foot in the air, heart surging into his throat. He looks up; a man is leaning against the archway, casual as anything, with his arms folded. He's tall, with hair deeply in need of a haircut and eyes just like Teddy's. There is something about him not quite real, not solid or ghostly.
"Bringing back the dead is tricky business, especially when there's no body to put them in."
Voice small and wary, Teddy says, "Dad?"
Remus tilts his head and smiles sadly. "Yes, Teddy."
Teddy wants to stand and stumble up onto that dais, but he finds himself rooted to his seat. "Are you a hallucination?"
"No." Remus lets his arms fall to his side. "I'm just here for a chat."
Teddy doesn't say anything for a long moment. He's well aware that he's staring but, really, he could spend absolute ages sitting here staring at his father, who seems equally content to be staring back at Teddy. Remus looks at him with so many things in his eyes (pity and affection and love and longing and so much impossible sadness) that eventually Teddy has to look away.
"I'm just here for a bit," Remus says. "A consolation prize for your efforts, if you will."
"You're not -" Teddy rubs his hands over his eyes. "This doesn't feel real."
Remus perches on the edge of the dais. He's so very close. "I can't imagine it does. It feels very unreal for me too."
Teddy knows, of course, how old his father was when he died, but he didn't expect him to look so young. He looks younger than Harry, though so much more exhausted, with a brittleness in the way he sits and holds himself. His shoulders are rigid. He looks sleepless.
"You don't look very at peace," Teddy says quietly, almost a whisper, thinking a moment later what a stupid thing that is to say.
Remus shrugs. "It's hard to say. I don't feel very at peace, per se, but I don't feel I am not content. Things feel very different, after. Linearity is nonexistent."
"Is my mum there, are you with her?"
Remus hesitates. "Yes. And no. It's - I'm not sure how to explain. It's not like it is here, Teddy."
There is a catch in his throat every time his father says his name. Teddy ducks his head, nodding and feeling more like a little boy than ever.
"Why Sirius?" Remus asks softly.
Teddy shrugs at first, an oddly petulant gesture, as though he is being told to brush his teeth and he doesn't want to. "I thought he might…I don't know. I thought there was a shot. I thought he might tell me something about you." I thought he could make me feel like you did and then I would know you. "You loved him?"
"Does it matter?"
Teddy looks at him helplessly. "I don't know. I don't know anything."
The aching in Remus' eyes sharpens and intensifies. "Yes, Teddy. I did love him for a while."
"And my mother?"
"I loved her too." He sounds so regretful. Teddy almost asks if he wishes he hadn't - hadn't loved her, hadn't married her, hadn't had Teddy. He's sure he wouldn't want to hear the answer, though, so he refrains.
There isn't nearly enough time - Teddy could not possibly encapsulate everything he needs to say to his father in these brief minutes, hours, days, decades. So he says nothing. And Remus says nothing. They sit together and watch each other until Teddy has to look away again, focusing his gaze on his interlocked hands until his eyes go out of focus.
"How much longer?" Teddy asks.
Remus doesn't answer. Teddy is still looking at the ground when he feels the air stir as Remus stands, hears the faintest shuffle as Remus moves toward him. Teddy is frozen. Remus' movements sound so deceptively solid.
"I'm very happy," Remus says, laying a gentle hand on the back of Teddy's head, barely stroking his hair, "to have seen you. I wish I could have known you, Teddy."
Teddy looks up, suddenly desperate to see, knowing it won't last - but when he blinks, Remus is gone.
He is struck by just how much time he wasted. He can't think of what he would have done differently. There wasn't enough time for anything.
It's a very long while before Teddy can get himself under control enough to leave.
---
He goes to Harry's because he's not sure where else to go.
He lets himself in and curls into the couch, nearly startling the life out of Harry when he enters the room some twenty minutes later.
"You might have given a shout when you came in," Harry says, nevertheless looking glad to see Teddy. "Nearly gave me a -" He pauses abruptly, perhaps catching sight of Teddy's face in the light. "Ted, has something happened?"
Teddy has not seen himself but he can imagine the picture he presents: red-eyed, miserable and tired, splotchy. Hellish, probably. "Tell me about my dad." Off Harry's look (both unsure and inquisitive), he adds, "Please."
Uncertainly, Harry takes a seat next to him. "What would you like to hear?"
Teddy considers this. "The last time you saw him," he says.
Harry doesn't speak for so long Teddy thinks he's not going to say anything. "I thought," he says slowly, finally, "that I was going to die." He shakes his head slightly at himself. "No, I knew I was going to die. I was at the edge of the forest and I knew that I wouldn't come out of it alive. I've told you about the Hallows." Teddy nods, raptly watching Harry's shuttered expression. "Before I went into the forest, I turned the stone and I saw my parents and Sirius and your father."
"Ghosts?" Teddy asks, voice small.
"More than ghosts." Harry worries his lip with his teeth. "Less than people."
"What did he say?"
Harry sighs. "That he was sorry. Sorry for not knowing you. That he hoped you would understand that he died for - for you, to create a better world for you."
"And then?" Teddy whispers.
"I went into the forest with them," he says. "And I died."
As often as Teddy has heard the story of Harry's defeat of the Dark Lord in his life, he realizes he's never heard it from Harry himself, and never quite like this. "Why didn't you ever tell me?"
Harry glances at him. "I don't know. The rush of things, after. I didn't even see you until weeks after Remus' death. Then…there was looking after you and you were so young, too young to understand, and then we had James and everything was just…happening, everyone was living their lives, and I didn't know how to tell you." He snorts. "Poor excuse, that I just couldn't find the right moment." He meets Teddy's eyes ruefully. "You were always very collected, even as a child. So calm, and bright. I thought maybe you understood without me having to say. You weren't like I was growing up. You had so many people who loved you, I thought you might be able to handle the loss better."
"How were you, growing up?" Teddy asks. It's so strange in retrospect that they've never talked this. He doesn't even know very much about Harry's childhood, just that he was raised by an aunt he didn't particularly like. Harry never talks about it. Which, Teddy supposes, is what's really telling.
Harry seems to struggle for words. "I was…well, not used to, perhaps, but…I didn't have anyone who cared about me for a long time. I didn't know what to do with the Weasleys; they didn't belong to me, even though I wanted them to, and I didn't belong to them. But Sirius…" Harry pauses and clears his throat. "When I lost Sirius, it…I didn't know how to handle it or even what he really meant to me. I'd wanted so badly - more than anything, I'd wanted him to take care of me. In the back of my mind, I always thought the day would come when he might. When I would live with him, maybe here." He encompasses the room with a wave of his hand. "And he would be something like my father and I would finally know what it was like to have one." He inclines his head toward Teddy. "Not that I realized that, really. I was just so angry. And then I acted like it didn't affect me. I acted like I was fine. It's startling how many years you can act like you're fine."
Teddy nods, swallowing hard.
"It took me a while to sort myself out. I knew him for such a relatively short time and he became so important to me so quickly. Losing him was - He was the only solid connection I had to my father, you know? He was the closest I would ever come to knowing my dad."
Teddy's chest aches at that. It all rushes over him, the last few months hitting him all at once, and he understands why Sirius Black became so imperative to him but also understands why now he's not. More than anything, Teddy wants to be back in that cold room with his father's hand in his hair.
"I don't know how I could miss someone I never knew so badly," Teddy says and then he's crying again, burying his face in his hands. He feels Harry's arm slide around him and he turns his head into Harry's shoulder, which he never did even as a child, so keenly aware that Harry wasn't his dad. Now he sobs into Harry's shirt though he's meant to be an adult. Harry doesn't question it, dropping a comforting hand onto Teddy's head like he has seen Harry do to Lily or Al in the past.
"What did you do tonight, Teddy, hmm?" Harry murmurs. "What happened to you?"
"I don't know," Teddy says, shaking his head. "I nearly did something massively stupid. And now I don't know, I just - I wish -"
Harry shushes him and Teddy is glad for it, the lump in his throat preventing much speech anyway. After a moment, Harry offers, "Sleep? And in the morning -"
"Yeah," Teddy agrees shakily. "Sleep. And in the morning."
Harry offers him a weak smile, pressing a kiss to the top of Teddy's head before standing. The lump in Teddy's throat contracts slightly, becomes less choking, and he takes a great shuddering breath before standing too.
Title: 'Twas Passing Strange
Rating: PG13
Word Count: 7,486
Pairing(s): Past Remus/Sirius and Remus/Tonks, one-sided Teddy/Sirius
Warnings: Angst
Disclaimer: All Harry Potter characters herein are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No copyright infringement is intended
Summary: Teddy is given an old journal of his father's. Suddenly everything he knew about Remus turns out to be nothing at all - and it seems like Sirius Black is the key to figuring everything out.
Author's Notes: Insane thanks to my beta K for being perpetually amazing! Made a brief reference to a Bob Dylan song. Title from Othello..
The journal begins like this: under a date in mid-June, the words Sirius died today.
Harry drops it into his hands with a distressed, helpless little shrug and says, "I - Bill gave it to me, must've - At some point during the - the last war, Remus must've left it there. It got swept in with a bunch of other things, I think, Fleur'd only just found it in a box of old stuff -"
"Thanks," Teddy interrupts. He doesn't glance up at Harry, who is no doubt furrowing his brow in worry. Teddy's eyes are locked on the journal in his hands, its hard leather cover, the pages thin with age. He looks without reading first. His father's handwriting is precise and clear though the pages it's contained upon are stained and dusty. "Was there anything else?"
Harry shrugs again. "I don't think so, no. Are you - are you alright?"
Teddy does look up then, mouth quirking into a tight, quick smile. He's not quite sure what to feel. "Yeah. Yeah, I -" He looks back at the journal. "Thanks."
Sirius is a familiar enough name for Teddy. Harry's godfather - there's a picture of him up in Grimmauld somewhere. Mostly he associates the name with James, though, and not so much James' namesake. He wracks his brain - Sirius died when, exactly? He's sure Harry told him. Harry was a teenager at the time.
That's how the journal starts; the next entry is marked a few weeks later and says only Moving today, again. No longer safe at Grimmauld. All the entries are like that. They're short, quickly scribbled notes on progress, full of names Teddy half-remembers from history books, wartime things.
He closes the book before he goes too far, holding it unintentionally tight in his hands. He should savour it, it's all he has.
Gran spoke fairly freely about Teddy's mum. He grew up with pictures of her all over the walls, every one inspiring a different anecdote. His childhood bedroom is the same one his mum grew up in; there are remnants of her everywhere, from the loud yellow of the walls (he never did have the heart to paint over it) to the Weird Sisters poster stuck on the ceiling with a Permanent Sticking Charm. Every time he changes his hair colour, he thinks of her and it's comforting. He feels close to her.
The thing is, no one ever really talked about Teddy's father (who he rarely thinks of as Remus or dad, preferring always my father? tilting up like a question, as if there's doubt) and Teddy never really knew how to ask.
He knows the basic facts, of course. Remus Lupin (a name sandwiched within Teddy's own): teacher, werewolf, friend of Harry's parents, hero. Hero. Now that's a funny one - that got stamped on all of them, didn't it? Anyone who died for the cause got saddled with the epithet. But Teddy's father isn't in the history books and that says it all, really.
Teddy tried to ask once, fourteen and terrified. He kept his voice as still as possible as he said to Harry, "Tell me about my dad."
Harry bit his lip and fumbled like he did, finally spitting out, "He was a good man. He meant a lot to me."
That's what they all said, when they said anything at all. Remus Lupin - he was a good man. That didn't tell Teddy anything.
Teddy craves raw meat sometimes. He isn't sure if it's psychosomatic or not but it's the closest thing he's got.
---
The journal stays tucked in Teddy's interior jacket pocket for three days before he looks at it again. The slight weight and bulk of it is a constant reminder.
After work he heads to Grimmauld for his weekly dinner with Harry. Since the divorce, with James traveling all over and Al immersed in work and Lily being, well, Lily about everything, Harry's been quite obviously lonely. Teddy knows how much Harry looks forward to seeing him every week so, parental angst or not, he wouldn't miss it.
As they sit there, chatting about this or that nonsense, it occurs to Teddy that Harry would understand better than anyone what he's going through. Of anyone, Harry would be the one to help him. Still, Teddy finds his throat is too tight for him to even begin to explain.
He sleeps there that night and, curled safely in room he's slept in every other week since he was fourteen, he opens the journal again, reading over what he's already read. He taps his finger against his mother's name every time he finds it.
2 July
Tonks has offered me a place to stay. Rather feel she's being a bit cheeky, but either way best not to encourage the flirtation.
10 July
Scrimgeour to replace Fudge. Mixed feelings. Another article about Harry.
11 July
Never know what to say to Tonks. She's beginning to look rather drawn. It's my fault. I didn’t ask for that. It's merely infatuation, I'm sure, and couldn't have come at a more inconvenient time.
22 July
Dementor attacks. Third time this month.
24 July
Igor Karkaroff dead. Hardly surprised. Ollivander gone.
31 July
Harry's birthday. I'm a poor excuse for any kind of - any kind of parental figure, I suppose. Now James and Sirius are both gone, I should be helping him. I haven't spoken to him in weeks and even today at the Weasleys' found myself at a loss. I should be asking how he is. I should be telling him about Sirius. I should be comforting him. But, like always, I do nothing.
Teddy pauses, closing the journal around the place-marker of his finger, and flops onto his back, staring at the canopy of his bed. Despite his stationary position, he can feel his heart beating hard in his chest. Victoire used to say that to him all the time. It's why they broke up. She said that exactly, he never did anything. Like he was paralyzed.
He opens it up again, flipping a few pages, skimming over every passage without his mother's name in it.
4 October
Kissed Tonks today. I don't know why I did that.
23 October
Tonks keeps Owling. I haven't returned one yet.
14 November
Spent the night with Tonks. God I am stupid and lonely and stupider for it.
Brow furrowed, Teddy stops again. Gran had never mentioned any problems between his parents, aside from her own distaste for their age difference and, though she'd never say it, a veiled dislike for his father.
He skips forward again, too eager.
13 January
Sometimes when we're lying together and Tonks lets me see her natural face, the face she was born with (or close enough to it), with her hair curling short and black around her ears, she reminds me so much of Sirius that it's a tangible pang. I love her, I think - or perhaps I love the things in her which are like things in Sirius, the liveliness of their eyes or that grin, something burning in both of them that seems so inextinguishable. Something I have rarely felt, at any rate. Her hair goes red-orange when she sees me, or a pink like a flush. I've never been so openly pursued. Her laugh is so loud - not barking, like Sirius, but loud and raucous and unladylike and lovely. I could come to love Tonks very much, I think.
Teddy stares at the page. That couldn't possibly - his father couldn't possibly mean -
In the morning, he sits across from Harry at the breakfast table and doesn't say a single word.
---
In the midst of wondering why everyone would encourage this false picture of his parents for years, it occurs to him that Harry might not have even known. The way his father mentioned it (like it was an old scar, the kind you get so used to it's like it isn't even there), the - the whatever-it-was with Sirius Black could've been years before Harry's time. Which leaves, in Teddy's immediate circle of availability, his Gran and Great Aunt Narcissa as references. Which might as well be like starting from nowhere. He can't exactly walk up to them and ask after his father's possible-maybe-who-knows gay lover.
The ink-stained, tea-stained, leather-bound parchment journals contain a multitude of musings but no definite answers on that one front: Teddy has no idea if his father fucked Sirius Black or not. Did he - did he just yearn, yearn like Teddy is prone to, and never doing anything about it? Or did he do everything and it was the losing of it that ripped his heart to shreds?
If his heart was even ripped to shreds - romanticism is another thing Teddy shares with his mother, if Gran is to be believed.
One page says: I wonder what it is like not to feel guilty. A few lines beneath it in another shade of ink: God, Remus, must you be so fucking melodramatic? And now I'm scolding myself. Below, again in another shade: For lack of anyone else to scold, really.
It's Teddy's favourite bit. His fingers know its place without trying now.
He hears the words in his father's voice - or, rather, the voice he has assigned to his father. It's a little of his own voice and a little of Harry's; something else, too, something fatherly, some tone of calm security that Teddy's not even sure is real.
On another page: Love is nothing to be proud of.
Teddy wishes his mother had kept a journal.
---
It comes together in bits and bobs. As an Auror, Teddy has some pull. Enough, at least, to drop a few hints, throw out a few lines. It's not long before his owl is dropping a plain, brown-wrapped package on his desk, slim and shaped like the last. The Hogwarts crest stares up at him from its bed of wax.
It feels too easy, really.
This journal is older, more carefully dated and kept. The stories it tells are of the schoolteacher variety; lesson plans, ideas for exam questions, that sort of thing. His father sounds much more content. Teddy hates it; he hates reading all the excitement and knowing how it ends.
His father speaks of Harry, mostly, and only sparingly of Harry's parents and Sirius. There is nothing to suggest anything deeper than a friendship firmly in the past. Teddy is beginning to think he's imagined the entire thing.
He sends a thank-you to Headmaster McGonagall for discovering it anyway.
Teddy begins to take the journals with him everywhere, opening them at every spare moment, as if some miracle tell-all passage will appear each time. There is only that one passage, however, that he reads over and over again. Perhaps I love the things in her which are like things in Sirius.
Teddy tries not to think too hard about the fact that his spot on the family tree is a mere skip and a jump away from Sirius' - he tries not to think too hard about the fact that out of all the girls he could've chosen, his father picked Sirius' cousin to marry - he tries very hard not to think about having his dad's eyes and the Black family nose, the straight narrow-bridged nose that his mum and his gran and her sisters and their cousins all had in every portrait he can see in Grimmauld Place.
---
The renovations on Grimmauld have been going on for nearly as long as Teddy can remember, though Harry's vigour for the task was renewed with his divorce. Teddy helps whenever he can. It's soothing to do mindless bullshit like take down wallpaper or sand furniture, try to undo the charm behind Mrs Black's portrait.
It occurs to him that now, however, there is another good reason to comb through the old house.
The only room in the entire house that Harry has not touched is Sirius'. Being on the top floor, hardly anyone has need of it, and Teddy can understand wanting to leave a little shrine behind. Teddy himself has never ventured inside it, as though there was an unwritten rule that it was off-limits. He decides Harry won't mind this once.
There, amongst far-flung dusty clothing and sheets that haven't been slept in in over twenty years, are all the things sixteen year old Sirius Black left behind when he ran away from home. The bedside drawer is full of offensively explicit girlie mags. Remnants of school uniforms are everywhere. Teddy threads a Gryffindor tie through his fingers, feeling the dust more than the fabric, and turns it over to find, surprisingly enough, the name R.J. Lupin sewn into the tag.
Methodically, Teddy searches every cabinet and drawer, taps every floorboard, uses every detection skill he can remember to unearth something hidden. He knows without knowing why that anything important he finds here will be secreted away. Which it is, he discovers, when one of his spells pushes aside a panel of the ceiling.
He hops up onto a chair and then onto the desk, adding a few inches to his height when even that is not enough. He casts a Summoning Charm; there is the faint sound of rattling but nothing emerges. Taking a deep breath and hoping not to encounter too much dust or rat droppings, Teddy plunges a hand into the darkness. He casts about for a few minutes before his fingers meet a hard edge, curling over the lid of what must be a box.
Teddy sets the box gently on the desk, clambering back to the ground. He traces the lip where lid meets body, the clasp. When he tries to open it, the clasp rears up and bites his finger. Nearly half-smiling, Teddy taps it a few times with his wand, muttering this or that, and the box lays deceptively dormant. Or honestly dormant, because when Teddy flips it open the second jinx he was expecting isn't present. Nothing happens.
Inside are a handful of photographs, a pack of parchment tied with twine, some notebooks, badges, and cigarettes. None of the notebooks are his father's, strictly speaking - they're full of all different inks and handwritings, notebooks passed between four boys throughout their school days. It almost doesn't read like English to Teddy; it's a language of inside jokes and half-sentences, reliance on the other person reading to understand without really explaining.
The pictures are mostly the boys too. Two of them tackling one while another takes the photo. Sirius and Harry's father sneak up on Teddy's father as he studies and his father's photo-self jumps so violently he's almost airborne for a moment. One is just of Sirius making faces at the camera. Teddy leans in closer and Sirius gives him a saucy wink.
He's very handsome, which Teddy remembers having heard before.
The pack of parchment is almost immediately revealed to be letters, some of them standing out because of the familiar scrawl.
Teddy sets them back in the box before he can be too tempted to pull the twine free and snaps the lid shut. His heart has found its way into his throat.
When Teddy returns downstairs, things all left in Sirius' room until he can deal with them again, he finds Harry putting lunch together.
"Alright, Ted?" Harry's eyes rake over him with concern, implying Teddy looks anything but.
"Yeah, yeah." Teddy sits at the table, nodding his head absently as Harry places food in front of him. "It's just this house, you know. Sometimes gives me the creeps."
Teddy's barely swallowed the last bite of his meal before he's bounding up the stairs again. Everything is just where he left it, of course.
Teddy sets aside any James letters for Harry. Then he stares at the little pile left for himself. He picks one up without looking at the date; might as well start anywhere.
Sirius, the letter begins. No salutations, no dashes, just Sirius, almost chiding. Sirius, don't be stupid. Difficult for you, I know. Regulus may be a prat but he's hardly -
Teddy zips through them. Most of the letters are like that: counselling. Don't run away. Stay with James when you do. Don't act rashly. Keep your calm. Count to bloody ten if you have to, Sirius, God.
The startling thing is, near the end of one such message, an entirely different handwriting, near-unintelligible: Say what you mean, Remus, say what you really mean. Teddy cross-checks with some of the other things from the box and, yes, it really must be Sirius' handwriting. Sirius' inky black lettering changes drastically from line to line, sometimes cramped and miniscule and in other places widely scrawled. It's like he was too excited to be focused, his hand unable to move as fast as his brain and him unwilling to compromise.
---
The owl shows up with a note from Harry explaining that, after Fleur found the last one, he'd gone through some of the things found in Godric's Hollow again. Wouldn't Teddy be pleased to know what he discovered?
Teddy locks himself in his office with the shades drawn and rests his forehead on his folded arms for a long, long time. Once his breathing is back under control, he cracks the journal to see the date and heaves a sigh of gratitude and relief. Nineteen seventy-nine.
Teddy's father has a lot to say about Sirius in nineteen seventy-nine.
Teddy's father speaks of the cigarettes Sirius Black smoked that expelled midnight blue puffs and smelled of cardamom and cloves, like a particularly spicy tea. Teddy remembers the half-crushed packet of them from the box (which smelled more like mothballs and dust) that Teddy now keeps in the back of his sock drawer. He's memorized the label by now; he picks them up on his lunch break.
Another day: At Sirius' flat. Dropped in on by his cousin Andromeda and her daughter. She left about a year's worth of food here for Sirius but we've consumed roughly three quarters of it already. I -
Then a squiggle and a splatter of ink, like the quill had been knocked out of his hand and, in entirely different but just as familiar font, Dear diary, Sirius is ever so handsome, it is a near physical pain to be in his presence without giving in to the burning desire to pin him to the mat- And then another splatter, then nothing, the journal beginning again quite normally on the next page with no mention of it.
It's Sirius being funny. Sirius and Teddy's father holed up in a flat having a laugh.
When Teddy goes home, he plays Sirius Black's records and smokes Sirius Black's cigarettes, imagining his father and Sirius and Harry's dad in Gryffindor Tower doing the same thing. They taste like something Teddy will never touch (a thrill in his throat; he's got his father's melodrama, hasn't he?) and he wonders if his father ever smoked Sirius' cigarettes or just tasted them on Sirius' tongue.
Teddy blows blue smoke rings, letting his hair darken and grow until it falls over his eyes. Moodily, he shuts his eyes and tips his head back; when he opens them, they're grey. He wonders idly if he got the shade right. Probably not. The music seems to mock him. Did you ever hear them church bells toll, it crows mournfully, mean another poor boy is dead and gone.
He gets up, ambling over to the mirror and shaking off his disguise as he does so. Unless he actively makes himself, he doesn't look much like his father. Except the colour of his eyes, as everyone always says. Maybe his mouth, from certain angles. It's hard to know unless people tell him.
He peers at himself, shaking his head until his hair gets longer and shaggier, brown mixed with grey. That makes the resemblance better. He changes the shape of his nose, makes it less proportionate, slightly sharper. A scar bubbles to the surface of his skin, slashed across his cheeks.
He turns back to his bed and, looping the dusty Gryffindor tie around his neck loosely, lets himself get taller and skinnier. The picture of Sirius is tucked into the entry about the flat. He touches himself and hears, in the voice he's given to Sirius (low and rough, sexy but boyish, playful), Remus.
He imagines a hand on the tie, pulling him close, imagines the hand on his fly is not his own. His back arches. Teddy, whispered in his ear.
---
When Teddy wakes up amongst the scattered debris of his own fucked up obsession, he almost makes a vow to himself to stop. To stop and pack up everything and start becoming a functional person again and maybe go on a date, or whatever it is normal people do. He splashes water on his face, shakes his hair blue, and has almost convinced himself of this plan, except for one key fact: he knows he'd never do it. He just wouldn't. He's an Auror; he's Harry Potter's godson; he's got a mystery in his hands and he can't do anything but solve it.
He acquiesces to a dinner with Gran. He breathes in her familiar homey kitchen smells and listens idly to her motherly chiding and interrupts, "Do you have anything of my father's?" When she falters, he continues, "Or Sirius Black's? Because I found some of my father's stuff at Grimmauld and I thought, maybe…"
She comes out of the kitchen wiping her hands on a dishtowel and observing him thoughtfully. "I don't know, love."
He knows she does, though. Gran's not the type to put something away and forget it; if she has something of theirs, she knows exactly where it is. He raises his eyebrows at her.
"Alright, alright." She smacks his shoulder as she walks past him. "Don't look at me like that, there's something in the attic. I'll fetch it."
The attic is where Gran puts everything she'd rather not think about. The package she emerges with is unopened and large, surprisingly weighty. She hands it to Teddy, who takes in the cracking purple Ministry seal and the quite faded writing, not clear enough to make out.
"It's what they found on him when he was arrested," she says softly. "Sirius. I never did - I don't even know why they sent it to me, really. I never felt right opening it."
Teddy traces a rip in the brown paper; he doesn't really feel right opening it either. Harry should be the one to do it, the first to handle the things his godfather had on him that night, all these things so thoughtfully returned to the family Sirius didn't love after the Ministry ripped him away from everything he did.
Teddy excuses himself to his old room and opens it.
There is a journal almost identical to all the others. A lighter. A picture of four boys with one of their faces madly scratched out. Teddy can picture Sirius (the handsome boy in the photo who smelled like spices and clean forest air) tormented with grief, tears in his red eyes, scratching out the traitor's face before he went to hunt him down.
Sirius' clothes are also in there. Not robes, though Teddy hadn't been expecting them, but stiff black jeans, a t-shirt with a rip in the collar, and a beaten up leather jacket. Teddy slides his arms into it, feeling it settle cool and dusty around him, and slips his hands into the pockets, fingers meeting a scrap of something.
It's another letter, nearly crumbling, folded over and folded over and folded over.
Teddy's father doesn't open with anything, just starts mid-thought. Teddy's not sure he knows anyone well enough to write them a letter that just begins, without any preamble. It speaks of an intimacy Teddy is unfamiliar with.
I can't forget what you said to me.
I can't, Sirius. It's remarkably unfair to do this to me. You know I feel a great deal for you. You know I You know me, Sirius. I can't imagine you would think - but we've all gone mad nowadays. I've thought things myself, terrible things - I wouldn't give in to them, though, you know that.
I didn't forget. That night before we left school. I didn't forget. I know you didn't either.
Teddy wonders where the evidence is of Sirius writing back - his responses must be lost or burned, done away with by Teddy's father. Or maybe Sirius didn't write back at all, just said exactly what he was feeling without needing the shield of writing it down. He seems the type.
Sirius did, however, seem fond of writing on letters. In the margins, at the foot of the pages, anywhere available defaced with his manic uneven scribble. His words are brief, concise, inconsequential. Several Remus fuck yous. Even more say what you means. And sometimes just Moony, over and over.
It's so fucking frustrating - so much non-information, so much lost. Was there no spell to show it all to Teddy? No mysterious source of all knowledge that could just lay it out for him, like a novel?
Well, there was one place, wasn't there, where secrets went.
And one man, dead, with all the answers.
---
Hermione looks at him quizzically, pausing as she reaches to pull a book off her top shelf. "Why is it you want to know all this, Teddy?" She steps off the ladder, holding the book close to her as she studies him, all sharp brown eyes. "You aren't thinking of doing something hasty, are you?"
Teddy is doing his best to look the part of the sweet trustworthy boy today. He's been looking like hell lately but today he's added a flush to his cheeks and left his hair childishly tousled. He looks at her just as quizzically. "What are you talking about?"
"Well, Teddy," she settles back behind her desk, folding her hands, very professional, "you recently found out some things about your father. And then you show up here asking me about necromancy. It's not very hard to connect the dots."
He breathes a sigh, almost laughing. "Hermione, I'm not trying to bring back my dad. That would be stupid."
"It would be." She's still examining him with a critical eye. "Teddy, you know you can't really bring people back, don't you? I mean, people have tried and succeeded to varying degrees, but the person you'd bring back wouldn't really be them." She softens. "Even when they did succeed, it was only when the person had suffered a magical death. There was spellwork that could be reversed and reworked. And Remus died a natural death, from the wounds he sustained during the battle. There wasn't anything anyone could do. It wasn't magic that killed your father."
Teddy could point out that dying in the middle of a battle before you're even forty is not exactly natural, but he refrains. "I know," he stresses instead. "Believe me, I know. I just want to - to understand a few things, you know?"
I want to understand being the key sentence to getting whatever you wanted from Hermione, she softens even further. "Well, I suppose a little research couldn't hurt." She reluctantly hands over the book, smiling at him sadly. "I trust you, Teddy. I hope it helps."
He swallows hard, forcing an answering smile back onto his face. He may not have lied, exactly, but he is tricking Hermione. He hates it. "Thank you."
---
Al is next. Teddy had planned it down to the last word so of course it came about unexpectedly; he catches Al in a hallway at work, looking harried in his purple Ministry robes. Teddy jumps at the chance, figuring it'll look all the less suspicious if it's a rushed conversation down a busy corridor.
Al looks exhausted, green eyes bloodshot as he wearily gives a, "Hullo, Ted. How are you?"
It's a wonder all the Unspeakables get that same look in their eyes after a few months, distant and worried.
Say what you mean, Teddy tells himself. "Al. I need a hand."
"With what?" Now Al is paying attention, eyes clearing as he takes in Teddy's slightly greying shaggy brown hair, his stubble. "Are you taller?"
Teddy waves that away. "Your department. Harry told me what it looked like inside. I wondered how - how do you know which room to go in?"
Al's eyes have narrowed slightly. "You do get the not speaking part of Unspeakable, right?"
Teddy smiles easily, as though that was an expected answer to his stupid question. "Alright, alright. Forgive me for wanting to know where your office is so I can unceremoniously drop in on you. We don't see each other very much these days, you know, I thought I might force it."
Al's heartstrings are tugged, as Teddy suspected they might be. "It'll get easier after my first few years," Al says. "I'm just so busy." He frowns to himself, seeming to struggle with something, then says, "Okay, but it's only because I trust you and you can't tell anyone and if you come by, do it in disguise or something."
Teddy grins. "Of course."
---
Teddy takes a few weeks off, claiming he needs a break, citing personal time. He must have been more off lately than he's realized because all he gets is a sympathetic nod and a soft, "Of course," from his normally hard supervisor.
Most of the time, Teddy reads. He plans. He studies like he never did at school - ancient Egyptian spellwork and Celtic magic. And he reads the journals over and over again, steeling himself.
There is a journal missing, from somewhere in the late seventies. The dates of the journals he has would prove him wrong, but he knows it. He can feel it. They burn in anticipation and then suddenly they're resigned and he knows - he knows - that something changed between his father and Sirius Black. Something happened.
---
James knows, I think. God love Lily, she's as oblivious as ever. I can't believe he wouldn't have told her. I suppose it's possible he doesn't know, only sometimes he looks at me so knowingly. Lately I feel as though everyone's looking at the wolf in me, as though it means I'm going to hand deliver them to the Dark Lord, but James never looks at me like that.
Sirius told me tonight he thinks there's something rotten in him, because of his family, his blood. I told him I understood that better than anyone.
---
Sirius laughs into Teddy's mouth, raucous but muffled, says you mad boy what did you do. He grasps Teddy with eager hands. Everything smells like dirt and stone.
Sirius is young, younger even than Teddy, younger probably than Teddy has ever felt. He is scattered like jazz, hands in Teddy's hair and teeth at Teddy's throat. His teeth are very white; he bares them like a dog, somewhere between a grin and a growl.
Teddy is all-encompassed by him. His breathing is gaspy and laboured and everywhere all he feels is Sirius. He is parchment and Sirius is ink, he bleeds all over everything. His eyes are grey as stone and his mouth is red, his mouth is on Teddy.
Teddy comes with a rush in Sirius' quick hands. Teddy wakes up with a sharp, painful inhale, as though he'd forgotten to breathe at all. His room is as quiet and empty as it's ever been.
---
It's not as hard to get into the Department of Mysteries as one might think, especially when he can walk in looking just like Al. No one questions him.
He steps through the plain black door into a large, circular room and thinks of stories Ron would tell them when they were little to amuse and frighten them, all these adventures they longed to go on. The black room with its shivering blue flames is less terrifying to Teddy now than it was as a child. It's just a room.
The wall shifts around him noisily. When he takes a step, he half expects the lacquered black floor to ripple beneath his foot, like throwing a rock into the still pond behind the Burrow.
He needn't have talked to Al. It's rather like the room is leading him. He finds the Veil behind the first door he tries, there in the sunken pit Harry once told him about, ringed by benches. Teddy hears it - something whispering, a soft murmur like background noise in a crowded room. He lets Al's face fade back into his own as he starts to set up.
His eyes blur as he's lighting a candle. He shakes the shivers out of his hand and lights the next. These spells are all the same, really - some words, some blood, something of the deceased. All spells are the same, really, it's just intent that matters.
The candles flicker as Teddy recites and, for a brief hopeful moment, the Veil thrashes about violently. There is a gust of cold air, extinguishing the torches and the candles, plunging the room into darkness. Teddy holds his breath, waiting.
Then the torches re-light and the room goes still again. Nothing happens.
Teddy waits.
Nothing happens.
He inhales shakily, scrubbing his hand across his cheeks to dry them. As though he's missed something, his gaze sweeps over the room. It's exactly the same as when he'd entered it. He shuffles madly through his papers, but he'd - he'd done everything right, exactly as he should have, there's no - there's no reason why it wouldn't -
There was a loophole. There had to be a loophole; his father died from the leftovers of spells - burns and cuts and crushed ribs - but Sirius Black just fell through a Veil, which meant he could fall back out of it.
Teddy slumps onto one of the benches. Sirius was - he was the only person who really knew Teddy's father, knew him best, knew what he kept secret, even from himself. He knew Remus' heart. And Teddy was so close.
"You did know it's impossible."
Teddy jumps nearly a foot in the air, heart surging into his throat. He looks up; a man is leaning against the archway, casual as anything, with his arms folded. He's tall, with hair deeply in need of a haircut and eyes just like Teddy's. There is something about him not quite real, not solid or ghostly.
"Bringing back the dead is tricky business, especially when there's no body to put them in."
Voice small and wary, Teddy says, "Dad?"
Remus tilts his head and smiles sadly. "Yes, Teddy."
Teddy wants to stand and stumble up onto that dais, but he finds himself rooted to his seat. "Are you a hallucination?"
"No." Remus lets his arms fall to his side. "I'm just here for a chat."
Teddy doesn't say anything for a long moment. He's well aware that he's staring but, really, he could spend absolute ages sitting here staring at his father, who seems equally content to be staring back at Teddy. Remus looks at him with so many things in his eyes (pity and affection and love and longing and so much impossible sadness) that eventually Teddy has to look away.
"I'm just here for a bit," Remus says. "A consolation prize for your efforts, if you will."
"You're not -" Teddy rubs his hands over his eyes. "This doesn't feel real."
Remus perches on the edge of the dais. He's so very close. "I can't imagine it does. It feels very unreal for me too."
Teddy knows, of course, how old his father was when he died, but he didn't expect him to look so young. He looks younger than Harry, though so much more exhausted, with a brittleness in the way he sits and holds himself. His shoulders are rigid. He looks sleepless.
"You don't look very at peace," Teddy says quietly, almost a whisper, thinking a moment later what a stupid thing that is to say.
Remus shrugs. "It's hard to say. I don't feel very at peace, per se, but I don't feel I am not content. Things feel very different, after. Linearity is nonexistent."
"Is my mum there, are you with her?"
Remus hesitates. "Yes. And no. It's - I'm not sure how to explain. It's not like it is here, Teddy."
There is a catch in his throat every time his father says his name. Teddy ducks his head, nodding and feeling more like a little boy than ever.
"Why Sirius?" Remus asks softly.
Teddy shrugs at first, an oddly petulant gesture, as though he is being told to brush his teeth and he doesn't want to. "I thought he might…I don't know. I thought there was a shot. I thought he might tell me something about you." I thought he could make me feel like you did and then I would know you. "You loved him?"
"Does it matter?"
Teddy looks at him helplessly. "I don't know. I don't know anything."
The aching in Remus' eyes sharpens and intensifies. "Yes, Teddy. I did love him for a while."
"And my mother?"
"I loved her too." He sounds so regretful. Teddy almost asks if he wishes he hadn't - hadn't loved her, hadn't married her, hadn't had Teddy. He's sure he wouldn't want to hear the answer, though, so he refrains.
There isn't nearly enough time - Teddy could not possibly encapsulate everything he needs to say to his father in these brief minutes, hours, days, decades. So he says nothing. And Remus says nothing. They sit together and watch each other until Teddy has to look away again, focusing his gaze on his interlocked hands until his eyes go out of focus.
"How much longer?" Teddy asks.
Remus doesn't answer. Teddy is still looking at the ground when he feels the air stir as Remus stands, hears the faintest shuffle as Remus moves toward him. Teddy is frozen. Remus' movements sound so deceptively solid.
"I'm very happy," Remus says, laying a gentle hand on the back of Teddy's head, barely stroking his hair, "to have seen you. I wish I could have known you, Teddy."
Teddy looks up, suddenly desperate to see, knowing it won't last - but when he blinks, Remus is gone.
He is struck by just how much time he wasted. He can't think of what he would have done differently. There wasn't enough time for anything.
It's a very long while before Teddy can get himself under control enough to leave.
---
He goes to Harry's because he's not sure where else to go.
He lets himself in and curls into the couch, nearly startling the life out of Harry when he enters the room some twenty minutes later.
"You might have given a shout when you came in," Harry says, nevertheless looking glad to see Teddy. "Nearly gave me a -" He pauses abruptly, perhaps catching sight of Teddy's face in the light. "Ted, has something happened?"
Teddy has not seen himself but he can imagine the picture he presents: red-eyed, miserable and tired, splotchy. Hellish, probably. "Tell me about my dad." Off Harry's look (both unsure and inquisitive), he adds, "Please."
Uncertainly, Harry takes a seat next to him. "What would you like to hear?"
Teddy considers this. "The last time you saw him," he says.
Harry doesn't speak for so long Teddy thinks he's not going to say anything. "I thought," he says slowly, finally, "that I was going to die." He shakes his head slightly at himself. "No, I knew I was going to die. I was at the edge of the forest and I knew that I wouldn't come out of it alive. I've told you about the Hallows." Teddy nods, raptly watching Harry's shuttered expression. "Before I went into the forest, I turned the stone and I saw my parents and Sirius and your father."
"Ghosts?" Teddy asks, voice small.
"More than ghosts." Harry worries his lip with his teeth. "Less than people."
"What did he say?"
Harry sighs. "That he was sorry. Sorry for not knowing you. That he hoped you would understand that he died for - for you, to create a better world for you."
"And then?" Teddy whispers.
"I went into the forest with them," he says. "And I died."
As often as Teddy has heard the story of Harry's defeat of the Dark Lord in his life, he realizes he's never heard it from Harry himself, and never quite like this. "Why didn't you ever tell me?"
Harry glances at him. "I don't know. The rush of things, after. I didn't even see you until weeks after Remus' death. Then…there was looking after you and you were so young, too young to understand, and then we had James and everything was just…happening, everyone was living their lives, and I didn't know how to tell you." He snorts. "Poor excuse, that I just couldn't find the right moment." He meets Teddy's eyes ruefully. "You were always very collected, even as a child. So calm, and bright. I thought maybe you understood without me having to say. You weren't like I was growing up. You had so many people who loved you, I thought you might be able to handle the loss better."
"How were you, growing up?" Teddy asks. It's so strange in retrospect that they've never talked this. He doesn't even know very much about Harry's childhood, just that he was raised by an aunt he didn't particularly like. Harry never talks about it. Which, Teddy supposes, is what's really telling.
Harry seems to struggle for words. "I was…well, not used to, perhaps, but…I didn't have anyone who cared about me for a long time. I didn't know what to do with the Weasleys; they didn't belong to me, even though I wanted them to, and I didn't belong to them. But Sirius…" Harry pauses and clears his throat. "When I lost Sirius, it…I didn't know how to handle it or even what he really meant to me. I'd wanted so badly - more than anything, I'd wanted him to take care of me. In the back of my mind, I always thought the day would come when he might. When I would live with him, maybe here." He encompasses the room with a wave of his hand. "And he would be something like my father and I would finally know what it was like to have one." He inclines his head toward Teddy. "Not that I realized that, really. I was just so angry. And then I acted like it didn't affect me. I acted like I was fine. It's startling how many years you can act like you're fine."
Teddy nods, swallowing hard.
"It took me a while to sort myself out. I knew him for such a relatively short time and he became so important to me so quickly. Losing him was - He was the only solid connection I had to my father, you know? He was the closest I would ever come to knowing my dad."
Teddy's chest aches at that. It all rushes over him, the last few months hitting him all at once, and he understands why Sirius Black became so imperative to him but also understands why now he's not. More than anything, Teddy wants to be back in that cold room with his father's hand in his hair.
"I don't know how I could miss someone I never knew so badly," Teddy says and then he's crying again, burying his face in his hands. He feels Harry's arm slide around him and he turns his head into Harry's shoulder, which he never did even as a child, so keenly aware that Harry wasn't his dad. Now he sobs into Harry's shirt though he's meant to be an adult. Harry doesn't question it, dropping a comforting hand onto Teddy's head like he has seen Harry do to Lily or Al in the past.
"What did you do tonight, Teddy, hmm?" Harry murmurs. "What happened to you?"
"I don't know," Teddy says, shaking his head. "I nearly did something massively stupid. And now I don't know, I just - I wish -"
Harry shushes him and Teddy is glad for it, the lump in his throat preventing much speech anyway. After a moment, Harry offers, "Sleep? And in the morning -"
"Yeah," Teddy agrees shakily. "Sleep. And in the morning."
Harry offers him a weak smile, pressing a kiss to the top of Teddy's head before standing. The lump in Teddy's throat contracts slightly, becomes less choking, and he takes a great shuddering breath before standing too.